the tower

Trauma, The Tower, and The Shit Happens Factor

The causes of trauma and how to deal with it.

Philosophers and religious leaders have long been fascinated with what we might call the, “shit happens,” factor in life. Perhaps it’s because of our human tendency toward binary thinking, but most creeds will fall into one of two categories: life is good and the universe is benevolent and loving; or life is hard and the universe is cold, capricious, and/or meaningless. The more spiritual religions tend toward the first view that life is good and the more primitive religions tend toward the view that life is hard.

If we look at it objectively, life is pretty good, pretty much most of the time. Unless we have the severe misfortune of living in a war zone or a climate disaster, most of us don’t have something terrible happening to us, right around 98% of the time. Most of us aren’t starving to death, suffering from a terrible disease, or in a constant series of car wrecks. To the extent that we’re unhappy or dissatisfied, it’s because of our own view of the world and not because something exterior is wrong.

It’s fairly easy, then, to build a case for the idea that life is good and the universe is benevolent and loving. Food is good, drink is good, sex is good, friends are good, creative fulfillment is good. Butterflies are good, birds are good, crystals and candles and incense and vibrators are good. There are a LOT of things about life that are good, and very few things that are bad.

Most of the time. But shit happens. Sometimes, really SERIOUS shit happens.

We can be walking along, singing a song, happy and free, when suddenly a speeding ice cream truck jumps the curb, runs over us and we’re in the hospital for months. And while we’re there, we lose our job, our house and car are repossessed, and our partner runs off to Tierra del Fuego with a tattoo artist.

That kind of an experience is exemplified in The Tower card. It’s the kind of an experience where everything in our lives is absolutely blasted into dust and we’re left standing there, psychically naked and bleeding, realizing that everything we believed in, everything we took to be solid and dependable, was nothing more than an illusion.

There’s a word for what happens to us internally when we go through that kind of experience: trauma. Gabor Mate’, who is one of the leading experts on trauma, says that trauma is a perfectly normal reaction to a completely abnormal event.

There are several components to trauma that have to be unpacked. First of all, it’s not a mild or everyday experience. We tend to overuse the word and talk about how a scary movie was traumatizing or it was traumatizing to spend Thanksgiving with relatives we don’t like. That’s not it. Trauma is caused by events that completely overwhelm the individual’s resources and leave her feeling absolutely powerless. These are things like rape, beatings, war, abandonment or abuse as a child, the death of a partner. These are HUGE events in a person’s life.

Another element in trauma is a sort of a psychic frozenness, a process where the person gets stuck in the traumatic experience. A very important point here is that deep suffering does not necessarily equal trauma. In the Tarot card, The Hanged Man, we see someone who has gone through very deep suffering but has come out on the other side with profound emotional and spiritual growth. He didn’t get stuck in the pain, he grew from it.

Put another way, he had the emotional and spiritual tools that were necessary to deal with the pain, therefore he wasn’t overwhelmed by it, therefore he wasn’t traumatized.

If we look at it on a purely physiological level, there’s a defined sequence of events that takes place in our brains when we’re confronted by a dangerous event.

1 – The amygdala (the so-called, “lizard brain”) starts the fight or flight reaction. We’re flooded with stress hormones, our hearts race, our hands shake. We either attack what’s threatening us or we run away from it. Either way, we resolve the danger.

2 – The amygdala shuts down the fight or flight reaction and our bodies and brains return to a normal state.

3 – The hippocampus, which is the part of our brains that controls memory, basically says, “Whew, glad that’s over,” and files it away as a completed event.

4 – Just in case that sequence doesn’t happen, the prefrontal cortex, which is like the CEO of our brains, says, “HEY! It’s over. Settle down, kids.”

We know from functional brain scans that this normal sequence doesn’t take place in trauma. The amygdala starts the fight or flight reaction but it never ends it. The hippocampus never properly files away the experience as being over and so we keep re-experiencing the traumatic event in the form of flashbacks and anxiety triggers. And the prefrontal cortex shows markedly diminished activity so it never says, “Hey, there’s nothing out there to threaten you.”

That’s why a combat veteran may end up cowering in a corner from hearing fireworks on the 4th of July. That’s why a rape victim may go into a full blown panic attack when she sees a harmless stranger in a parking garage. That’s why so many trauma victims become alcoholics and drug addicts in an attempt to numb what they’re feeling. Because, in a very real sense, it’s NOT over for them. They’re still living in active fight or flight mode, they’ve never been able to digest the event as a memory, and they’re not able to intervene rationally and say, “There’s no danger.”

So what can we do about all of that? What can we do to draw ourselves out of the disaster of The Tower card and into the spiritual wisdom of The Hanged Man?

First and foremost, a good therapist can be invaluable. Remember, the trauma happened because the person felt overwhelmed and didn’t have the resources to deal with it. A good therapist can start to fill up our emotional and spiritual tool boxes and give us those resources that we didn’t have when we were overwhelmed. We can learn to reframe the experience, to intervene with compulsive anxiety patterns, to stop in the middle of a panic attack and really tell ourselves, “There is NOTHING wrong. Breathe deeply. Relax.”

There are a couple of simple techniques we can use at home, as well. Harvard Medical School and Dr. Dawson Church have both demonstrated that EFT Tapping sessions can dramatically reduce the presence of the stress hormone cortisol and calm the activity of the amygdala. Tapping basically takes us out of the endless loop of the fight or flight reaction and begins to turn the traumatic event into a neutral memory. There are resources for tapping all over the internet but a good place to start is with Rick Ortner, who’s done so much to disseminate the technique.

Another simple technique is mindfulness meditation. Like tapping, mindfulness meditation reduces cortisol and calms the amygdala’s fight or flight response. Even more dramatically, though, after only 8 weeks of practicing mindfulness meditation, the amygdala actually shrinks and the prefrontal cortex grows. Literally, anxiety and fear are physically shrinking while rational thought is growing. Again, there are resources all over the internet for practicing mindfulness, but here’s a nice guided meditation from Great Meditations to get you started.

Most of us who are on a spiritual path prefer to think that life is basically good and that the universe has an underlying energy of love and creativity. Nonetheless, shit happens. To all of us, sooner or later. We don’t have to make it a continuing feature of our lives, though. We can move out of painful experiences stronger, wiser, and more evolved than when they occurred and get back to enjoying butterflies and birds, crystals and incense, good friends and vibrators. L’chaim!

Entropy, Coyote, The Tower Card, and That God Person

A brief exploration of why god didn’t make shit happen.

I have a lot of friends who are atheists. While I disagree with them (leaning more toward polytheism myself), I can’t blame them for feeling that way. When humans talk about god they tend to get plumb ridiculous.

It isn’t hard to imagine where the idea of god originated. We can visualize one of our very ancient ancestors standing beside a tree scratching his crotch when – KABLAM!!! – a giant bolt of lightning hits the tree and blows it into a million smoldering pieces. Being a thinking primate, our ancestors’ initial reaction was probably deeply profound. Something along the lines of, “HOLY SHIT! WHAT IN THE HELL WAS THAT???”

A little later, he probably tried to reason out exactly that question: “What in the hell was that?” He would have noticed, of course, that whatever IT was, IT had come from the sky. From up there, somewhere. Therefore, he would have arrived at his initial conclusion: there MUST be a, “somewhere,” up there. There must be some place up in the sky that the lightning monster came from. Just for ease of discussion, he thought, let’s call it, “heaven.”

So did the lightning monster fall out of heaven? Did it slip over the edge and tumble down to earth? No, he’d reason; upon consideration it was much more like it was THROWN from the heaven place because it hit really hard. As he turned this over in his brain cells, it would dawn upon him that if it had been thrown, then there must be someone up there in the heaven place who threw it. And when we throw something at someone, it’s usually because we’re pissed off. Therefore, the heaven person must have been pissed off at me, he thought, and he threw a lightning monster at me, but he missed me and hit the tree. Poor tree.

So just in the space of a few hours, he’d worked out that there was a place in the sky called heaven, that someone lived in it, and that he had a very bad temper that caused him to throw things at people he was pissed off with. And he decided that, just for ease of discussion, he’d call that heaven person, “god.”

Now, of course, the next step would be to figure out why god was pissed off and, logically, it must have had something to do with what our ancestor had been doing when the god person threw the lightning monster at him. And when he thought back on it, he realized that he’d been scratching his crotch. “Aha!” he thought. “The heaven person must not like crotches because . . . um . . . we use them for sex! That must be it!’

And just like that, he’d invented the concept of sin.

So we can see that our incredibly wise ancestor was able to come up with the notions of heaven, god, and sin, and deduce all of that from the presence of a lightning bolt that hit a tree. Brilliant, really.

There were a few flaws in his reasoning about god that would come back to haunt us. First of all, the god person seems to be a bit on the irrational side. Why wouldn’t he like crotches? They’re perfectly nice human apparatuses that make us feel really good, so what’s his problem with them? Especially as the idea that the god person actually MADE us evolved, it seemed more and more problematic that he wouldn’t like our genitals. If he didn’t like them that much, why didn’t he just make us with something else between our legs, like, I don’t know, a flower or an extra foot or something?

Second, we can see that god has a really bad temper. A really, really bad temper. If he didn’t like what we were doing, he could have just sent a nice angel with a handwritten note that said, “Hey, that’s really irritating, so knock it off.” But, no, he has to blow up a tree.

Third, we see that this god person is very strongly associated with bad things happening. If a tree blows up or there’s an earthquake or a flood or a tsunami, it’s because god is PISSED. It’s a punishment, presumably because we’ve been playing with our genitals again.

We can see that idea pretty clearly illustrated in the Tarot card called The Tower. Most of the Tower-Being-Hit-By-Lightning myths have to do with punishment for human hubris. Those idiots were trying to build a tower so high that it would reach to the heaven place and the god person got pissed and blew up the tower, just to show them that HE owned the heaven place and not them.

There’s actually a conundrum hidden in The Tower card that theologians have wrestled with for centuries. If god loves us, and god’s all powerful, why does all of this bad stuff keep happening to us? I mean, if he can control everything, why doesn’t he just make good stuff happen to us? Why is there cancer and fires and floods and why do terrible, terrible things happen to people?

The traditional answer goes right back to the idea that god is an extreme control freak with a really bad temper. He WANTS for good stuff to happen to us, but we keep doing the wrong things and so he HAS to make bad stuff happen to us. Because we’re crotch scratching sinners, doncha know?

Native Americans had a slight shift in that perspective that makes a major difference in how we view the world. They noticed that there is a factor in the universe which physicists would later label as, “entropy.” The definition for entropy is, “a lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.” Another way of putting it is that any organized system will start to disintegrate.

On a practical level, that means that just as soon as we get things arranged to our satisfaction, they start to fall apart. It’s like when we clean our houses and then a week later they’re a mess again. Entropy snuck up and bit us in the ass.

Native Americans built that into their theology and we might call it, “the shit happens,” principle. Yes, there are loving, benevolent gods who want our lives to go perfectly well and want us to be happy. But sometimes shit happens. And when it does, it’s because of the Trickster Gods, like Coyote and Raven. The benevolent gods are busy weaving a beautiful tapestry of life, but the trickster gods are over there in the corner unraveling it as fast as they can. They’re entropy and they’re making the system disintegrate.

On the one hand, this allows us to have loving, caring gods. On the other hand, it explains why shit happens. In this scenario, the lightning bolt that hit the tree our ancestor was standing next to would have been sent by Raven or Coyote. And they would have been laughing their asses off when they watched him jump.

That turn in their theology was actually a very important step. First of all, it acknowledges that shit happens. Second, it says that shit happens, JUST BECAUSE. It doesn’t necessarily have a damned thing to do with us or whether we’ve sinned or we’re scratching our crotches again. It just happens because entropy is a part of the fabric of the Universe. Coyote or Raven are always there, turning our orderly, sensible worlds upside down, JUST BECAUSE. So it gets rid of the concept of sin and we don’t have to feel guilty about our genitals anymore.

Most importantly, though, it gets rid of the nutso, bipolar, control freak, mean bastard that we’ve had running heaven. It’s not OUR fault that shit happens, but we also don’t have to invent a crazy god to explain it. No more vengeful patriarch who’s just itching to throw us into eternal flames. No more voyeuristic stalker who’s counting how many times we masturbate so he can punish us for it. No more crazed Jehovah demanding that Abraham shove a knife into his son’s chest to prove how much he loves god.

And, all in all, the heaven place is much nicer without him.

Dan Adair is the author of, “Just the Tarot,” available on Amazon.com at a very reasonable price.

Predicting the Future, Predestination, and Black Out Drinking

I can state with no hesitation at all that Tarot cards, “work.” What I mean by that is that, after decades of using them, I can attest to the fact that most of the time they’re mostly accurate in predicting the future outcomes of current events.

Which, of course, leaves a lot of questions hanging about exactly what we mean by the future and how it can possibly be predicted if it doesn’t exist yet.

There is a particularly hideous christian doctrine called, “predestination,” which holds that the future is, somehow, already decided. It was espoused in different forms by Augustine and the Calvinists, and is sort of the logical outcome of the christian world view. It holds that

God is all knowing and all powerful;
Which means that God already knows exactly what’s going to happen in the future; and
Human beings don’t have the power to change what God knows to be true;
Therefore, the future is already decided and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The upshot of that – according to their thinking – is that it’s already been decided that some people are going to heaven and some people are going to hell and that’s just the way it is. If you belong to the,“hell group,” it doesn’t matter how good or kind or compassionate you are in this lifetime, you’re still going to hell. Why? Because God already decided what the future is going to be.

Pretty weird, huh? I mean . . . it’s logical, in a strange, twisted way . . . but what a bizarre, cruel way to view life and God.

It has a major flaw in that it’s what philosophers would call a, “closed system.” That means that, if everything’s already been decided, then nothing can change, evolve, grow, or become different in any meaningful sense. And if nothing can grow or change, then it’s dead. And, as we all know, if there’s one thing in the universe that’s constant, it’s change. Everything is constantly growing, changing, and evolving and all we have to do to prove that is to look out the window.

So Predestination was kind of a sick, christian brain fart that grew into a religious doctrine. It would be laughable, except for that belief that the future somehow exists already and, therefore, can be predicted.

Which it can, but not because it already exists. It can be predicted because some things are . . . well . . . predictable.

Here’s an example. I live in Northern California which has been burning down with wildfires all summer. The Western United States has been in a major drought for two years, the forests are overgrown and dry as a match stick, and the government refused to fund any additional firefighters or fire fighting equipment.

THEREFORE . . . it was entirely predictable – last winter – that we were going to have an AWFUL summer of forest fires. No question about it. That doesn’t mean that the forest fires somehow already existed in the future, it just means that all of those factors – drought, overgrown forests, not enough firefighters – added up to a very predictable event. In terms of Tarot cards, it would have been represented by The Tower – disaster and destruction.

Human beings are also very, very predictable. If we have a friend who has a history of being involved with abusive men, the odds are very high that she’s going to go right on getting beaten up, unless she gets therapy. If we have a friend who’s suddenly experiencing black outs when he drinks, the odds are very high that he’s going to devolve into an alcoholic.

We tend to get stuck in patterns – or perhaps ruts would be a better term – and keep going in those directions unless something intervenes and changes our course. To put it in terms of Newton’s Laws of Motion, “an object in motion will stay in motion at constant velocity, unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” In this case, a life going in a particular direction will tend to keep going in that direction unless something happens to change that.

Essentially, that’s all that a Tarot reading does. There are card positions for the past, the present and the future, as well as possible intervening factors. The reading is just saying, “This is what’s happened in your past, this is where you’re at now, and this is, logically, where that pattern is taking you next. Here’s what you can do to change that, if you want to.”

The magic, of course, is how all of that information gets into a card layout. How do the cards somehow pick up on what’s happening in our lives and transfer that into a discernible, coherent pattern in a reading?

I have no idea. I just know that it works. I really don’t understand exactly how electricity, “works,” either, but that doesn’t stop me from flipping on a light switch if the room is dark.

When we’re talking about, “predicting the future,” it’s always important to remember that nothing’s ever written in stone. It’s very, very likely that a person who is into abusive relationships will go on being abused. BUT – sometimes they find a great therapist. It’s very, very likely that a person who’s having black out drinking will end up dead or in jail. BUT – sometimes they stumble into an AA meeting or just stop drinking.

In a very real sense, we’re not predicting the future at all. We’re predicting the present. And we can always change our present moment.

Dan Adair is the author of, “Just the Tarot,” available on Amazon.com at a very reasonable price.

The Tower, the Rules, and the Hidden Gift of Losing It All

The gifts that may be concealed in disasters.

It can be hard to find anything positive to say about The Tower card in the Tarot. It shows a tower being struck by a lightning bolt and the inhabitants of the tower plunging to their death and destruction. When you draw the card in a reading, it symbolizes total disaster, either on a physical or a psychological level. Everything that you believed in and held dear is being blasted into debris and smoke. It gives any Tarot reader a real case of the heebie-jeebies.

Most people don’t experience that kind of total destruction. That’s not to say that they don’t have terrible or traumatic experiences sometimes. Usually, though, most of their world remains intact. A person’s partner may leave, but she still has her children. Or perhaps she’s fired from her job, but she still has a sizable savings account. Or her house burns down, but it was fully insured. Yes, we all experience disasters of greater or lesser magnitude, but it’s rare to have everything fall apart at once, to be left with nothing but a shell of our life.

When that happens, we lose our sense of being in the world, our sense of living in a sane, orderly, safe universe where we fit in and life is predictable. It’s literally like being in a psychological and spiritual earthquake, where previously solid ground has shaken and shifted and split apart and left you standing in ruins.

In his book The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Penguin Psychology), R.D. Laing refers to what he calls, “ontological insecurity.” Ontology is the philosophy of being, of studying how we, as living beings, fit into and exist in our world. Ontological insecurity, then, is the pervading sense of not fitting into the world, of not belonging.

We can see a mild example of that when someone travels overseas. Every society has unwritten rules that the citizens just take for granted. There are macro-cultural rules like the fact that in America we drive on the right hand side of the road and we mostly speak English. There are also micro-cultural rules like the fact that people who live in the Southern part of the United States make eye contact and smile as they pass strangers on the street and people in New England don’t. A woman on the East Coast may wear skirts and heels to work every day while a woman in California wears jeans and a blouse.

Whatever the rules are for that particular society, they are so comfortable and so well known by the people who live there that they operate on an almost unconscious basis. People take the underlying rules for granted and because of that they fit in. They know their place in the world and how to behave in it. That’s ontological security.

If you were to take one of those people, though, and parachute them into Thailand or Indonesia or India, their ontological security would vanish. Suddenly they’re in a place where the language sounds like gibberish, people drive on the wrong side of the street, buildings aren’t, “right,”, bathrooms aren’t right, the beds are weird, and the money makes no sense.

In other words, they don’t know the rules.

There’s very much the same sense of angst when your whole life blows up in your face. When you lose your life partner AND your home AND your job AND your family walks away from you. Not only are our lives shattered, but, even worse, we’re left with a sense that the world just doesn’t make sense anymore, that nothing is safe and orderly and predictable, and that no one is trustworthy.

In other words, we feel like we don’t know the rules anymore.

And that’s ontological insecurity.

R.D. Laing was working primarily with severe schizophrenics and, unfortunately, many of them never come back from whatever hell-scape they happen to be living in. With those who did come back, however, he likened their illness to a shamanic journey, a deep, spiritual pilgrimage to strange dimensions where our ordinary sense of reality, our, “rules,” of behavior simply don’t exist.

Having the underlying fabric of your life destroyed can feel very much like that sort of a descent into madness. Unfortunately, when we’re faced with total disaster, most of us can’t stand to live in that space for very long. It’s too threatening, too scary, too overwhelming to face the fact that our lives are built on a very thin veneer of rules and normality which really have no substance to them. And so we begin to reconstruct our lives as rapidly as possible using the same template that failed us in the first place.

Your wife died? No problem – get remarried.

You lost your shitty job? No problem – get another shitty job.

Your family deserted you? No problem – join a social club or AA or a church and make a synthetic family.

We desperately want to get back to our sense of safety but, in doing so, we lose the gift of the loss, the gift of the shamanic journey into darkness. And make no mistake, losing everything can be a magical gift because it can make us realize that we never really had it to begin with.

When we realize that everything we treasure can vanish, then we can begin to reconstruct our lives with things that are real and won’t disappear in the next disaster. Love. Compassion. Inner wisdom. Peace. Tranquility. But first we have to relinquish the safety of our, “rules,” and our so-called normal lives. As Pema Chodron said in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times/p>

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. ”

The gift of The Tower is to be fully alive and fully awake, to live without our previous illusions. If we choose to take the gift.

9/11 and The Lightning Struck Tower

As I’m writing this it’s the 18th anniversary of the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11. There are so many images of horror and death from that day that it’s difficult to ever really process them.

A flaming, collapsing Tower is truly a human archetype, as The Tower card shows. The image is deeply seared into the human unconscious and we can find examples of it in numerous cultures across the world.

The common theme in all of the stories is the hubris of humanity, building massive towers to reach the gods or to be equal to the gods or to confront the gods.

They’d get to a certain height and the gods would blast the towers into rubble to punish them for their arrogance.

In the case of 9/11 we could say that the hubris didn’t involve people trying to confront the gods so much as people trying to BE the gods. We can draw a direct line between organized religion and the Twin Towers and that SHOULD be the most important lesson here.

Remember: Osama Bin Laden was a very, very religious man who stopped and prayed several times a day. He orchestrated the attacks on the Twin Towers because he believed that god told him to incinerate thousands of human beings.

Which is just fucking nuts.

On the other side of the fence, we see Americans recoiling in disgust when Central American immigrant children are imprisoned in camps at our borders. We forget that Palestinian families have been living in horrible camps for generations.

That’s happening because the ultra-right party in Israel believes that centuries ago a Thunder God named Yahweh told the Jews that the land the Palestinians owned actually belonged to the Jews so it’s okay to steal it.

Which is just fucking nuts.

BUT . . . the Israeli land grab is mostly supported by the United States because American Christian evangelical voters believe that Armageddon will happen in the Middle East when the Jews and the Muslims go to war and then all of the Christians will be whisked up to heaven where they’ll eat pancakes with Jesus forever. Amen. So, anything that causes troubles between the Muslims and the Jews is a GOOD thing for the Christians because . . . um . . . it will cause the end of the world.

Which is just fucking nuts.

We really are reaching a point of critical mass in the world today, a point where violent religiosity in all its forms has to be rejected as psychotic behavior. We’re distracted by the outer shapes of the various religions but it’s the same hateful fundamentalism whether it’s hiding under an Imam’s robe or a preacher’s suit.

It almost always involves a belief that their religion – and their religion alone – is the true word of god. A belief that it’s somehow okay to murder, torture, rape, and drop bombs on innocent children if you’re doing it in the name of your god. It almost always involves a hatred of art and a war on women and female sexuality.

And it’s time to say, “Enough.” The rest of us actually live in the towers that these fanatics are blowing up. The rest of us are the innocent civilians caught in the middle of their violent, psychotic fantasies.

Enough.

Abuse Cards in the Tarot

One of the most frequent reasons for people to consult a Tarot reader is relationships, specifically romantic relationships. This includes the full gamut of topics from, “Does Bobby like me?” to, “Is my marriage worth saving?”

You may find that a prominent subcategory of that topic is physically and/or emotionally abusive relationships. People who are in abusive relationships are frequently desperate for advice and guidance.

You may also find – as any cop, social worker, or emergency department nurse can tell you – that the questioner may not even be willing to admit that he or she is in an abusive relationship. They may be deeply ashamed of it. They may have been victims for so long that they’re afraid to reveal the truth, afraid that talking about it will only bring more abuse down on their heads.

It can be very puzzling to a reader. You’re looking at a reading that indicates that something is very, very wrong in the questioners life and, yet, they assure you that everything’s fine. There are, however, a few cards that can tip you to what’s actually happening.

NINE OF WANDS

The picture kind of says it all, doesn’t it? This card may well indicate an abusive relationship though at this point – given that this is a Wands card and, thus, ideas card – the abuse is probably more verbal than physical. A couple living in a constant state of verbal warfare with nasty, wounding arguments.

EIGHT OF CUPS

A card of stealing away in the night, this may indicate someone who is literally fleeing from a really bad relationship. This can be a relationship that is SO bad that the questioner is leaving town to get away from his or her partner.

FIVE OF SWORDS

This is a card of really ugly power games and can indicate a person who is a serious sadist. Deep wounds are being inflicted here and they may be actual physical wounds as well as emotional wounds.

SIX OF SWORDS

This appears to be a fairly placid card on its’ surface but there are undertones that can indicate abuse. As I said in the original definition from my book, “Just the Tarot,” this is a card of leaving troubles behind and moving toward better times. A journey from rough waters to waters that are placid and calm. There is a definite element of escape, of fleeing in this card.

There is also an element of hiding and of turning your power over to someone else and asking them to guide you to safety. The woman and child are cloaked and bent over, as if to conceal their identities.

I have seen this card frequently in the context of an abused wife or girl-friend fleeing to a women’s shelter or finally, finally calling the cops to stop the abuse.

SEVEN OF SWORDS

This card doesn’t so much indicate physical abuse but may point toward a form of emotional abuse. The questioner may be involved with someone who is stealing his or her power in a relationship, belittling them, and grinding down their sense of self-worth on a daily basis.

EIGHT OF SWORDS

Again, the picture pretty much speaks for itself. A person who is literally being held prisoner in a terrible relationship. The blindfold can indicate a high level of denial on his or her part, refusing to even acknowledge, much less deal with, the fact that they’re in deep shit.

TEN OF SWORDS

This may well be the scariest of the abuse cards. It’s the end of the power cycle and the subject lies dead on the battlefield stuck full of the swords that he or she tried to wield. A reminder that abusive relationships can have horrible endings.

NINE OF PENTACLES

I’m including this card in the post, not because it shows overt physical or emotional abuse, but because it may show a certain form of emotional or financial bondage in a relationship. The woman in the card is to all appearances happy, content, and surrounded by wealth. One of the key elements of the card, though, is the blindfolded hawk. This card may indicate a person who has – perhaps willingly – surrendered his or her freedom for financial security. There can be a great deal of inequity and inequality of power in a relationship like that and that can certainly lead to abuse.

THE DEVIL – UPRIGHT OR REVERSED

The Devil can, of course, indicate a whole slew of other things besides relationship abuse but it’s almost always there when abuse is present. You have to be a wee bit cautious in automatically assuming that, though, because human sexuality covers a whole spectrum of behaviors. I have never personally understood it but there ARE people who enjoy giving and receiving pain as a part of their sexual experience. If it’s mutually agreed on, it’s none of our business.

Despite that, The Devil can be a clear indicator of a relationship that has gone very, very wrong. The man and woman are chained but the chains are obviously loose enough to be slipped off if they chose to do so. There is an element of voluntarily sinking into a terrible, poisonous relationship and elevating the very worst of human nature into a so-called, “relationship.” The abuse here can be emotional, physical and spiritual.

THE TOWER

The Tower can show abuse but it’s probably just happened. The Tower is sudden calamity, a bolt from the blue, a shocking development. Chronic abuse can go on for years. It may be shocking to others to discover it’s been going on but it’s certainly not shocking to the victims or perpetrators. Depending upon the surrounding cards this may indicate the very start of the abuse cycle.

THE MOON

As I said in my original definition: The Moon shows that the questioner may be involved with someone on a very primitive, unconscious level and that there may be deception on the part of the partner or, more likely, denial on the part of the questioner. There is a lot of emotion present but it may not be of a healthy, evolved nature.

This card can show the depths of rationalization and deception involved in an abusive relationship. Everything is murky, shadowy, and there’s no clear path out for the victim.

So those are the primary cards that may indicate an abusive relationship. They don’t always indicate that but you’ll be able to tell a great deal by the surrounding cards. I would also emphasize that these are by no means the only cards that can indicate abuse. Abusive relationships can be incredibly complex and so can the readings for the person being abused.

A crowned tower atop a peak has been struck by lightning. The crown on the tower has been knocked off and flames sprout from the windows. Two people have been knocked out of the tower and are falling toward the ground.

This isn’t necessarily a horrible card to get in a reading but it can be. If it’s effects are softened by other cards in the reading it may just show a sudden reversal of luck or the destruction of a belief system.

At its’ worst it can indicate a real calamity. It can show a huge financial loss, for instance, or a home being lost or destroyed. On the level of relationships it can show a complete loss of faith in the relationship or the person the questioner is involved with. Imagine coming home and finding your husband in bed with the baby sitter. THAT kind of loss of faith.

One of the aspects here is that the loss tends to be sudden and totally unexpected. It’s not something you can plan for, it just happens with no warning. That’s a major part of the feeling of devastation. Like the lightning bolt it’s literally shocking.

Another aspect is that it tends to shake you to the core. You question your beliefs, your faith, all of the things that you took for granted in what is now your former life.

Did I mention this is a bad card?

REVERSED: The calamity has happened and the questioner is now in the recovery phase. The question is whether he or she will find the inner strength and spiritual resources to deal with the loss and rebuild their life.

Some More Thoughts About the Tower:

Shit happens.

And that’s one of those terrible truths that can be so difficult to accept. You can be walking merrily down lifes’ path, whistling a happy tune and admiring the sunshine when you get run over by an out of control ice cream truck.

Shit happens. When it happens to someone we don’t like or someone who is a blatant bastard we tend to say, “Ah, HA! He certainly got what he had coming!”

When it happens to someone who is a really good person – or even worse, to us – it tends to be more of a head scratcher. We tend to revert back to that child-like state and ask, “Why did this happen to me? I’ve been good.”

And we do buy into that equation that the quality of your life is equal to the quality of your actions. If you’re a good person, then good things will happen to you. If you’re a bad person then bad things will happen to you.

We buy into that despite a lot of proof to the contrary. There are some very wealthy people who have screwed over everyone they’ve ever met. There are many loving, kind people living in abject poverty and hunger. Philosophers and religious leaders have been trying to explain that for as long as humans have existed.

The fact is that we don’t really know why catastrophe strikes one person and not another. We just know that it does. The only thing we know for certain is that personal disaster either builds character of it destroys it. When your entire world has just gone up in smoke, when you’ve lost everything that you held dear, then all that’s left is what you’ve got in your own heart. You either use the strength you’ve got inside of you or you develop inner strength in the process of recovery.

Alternatively, you can just give up. Or become a cynic who despises life. Or cry out that there’s no justice and life isn’t fair.

Because . . . you know . . . shit happens.